4 ms·

> Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text. Wikipedia is not static tex

> Wikipedia doesn’t really cost anything because it’s just static text Thats like saying facebook or twitter are just static text. Wikipedia is not static text. It runs Mediawiki which runs on PHP and requires a database, plus all forms of caching. They also serve media (images/video) have users, discussions, comments, etc. And at wikipedia's scale they're not trivial problems to solve and dont cost peanuts for hosting.

lapinot 3y ago
Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.
- pas 3y ago
  it's in the top10 sites worldwide, it's ridiculously naive to assume it's just servers and a few BGP dudes.
akolbe 3y ago
The actual Internet hosting costs have consistently been less than $3 million a year: 2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf#page=6 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim... 2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2019-2020_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim... And they were the same a decade ago: 2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL_11_12From_KPMG.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.
- IceWreck 3y ago
  What about development costs ?
  - akolbe 3y ago
    You mean for software features and the like? Some good work has been done there in the background – it's not stuff that readers would notice, but contributors do. It wouldn't be fair to say that all the money has been mis-spent – there are lots of people working at the Foundation who are doing good work and who are not getting rich – especially bearing in mind the cost of living in parts of the US (though this begs the question whether the work could not be done more cost-effectively elsewhere).
    - bawolff 3y ago
      Note - many wmf staff do not live in the usa. Some who do do not live in expensive parts of the usa.
  - George83728 3y ago
    The last time Wikimedia Foundation released a new project website was WikiData in 2012, more than 10 years ago. Okay well maybe that's not fair. They did recently update the CSS for Wikipedia itself ... I don't know how many millions of dollars they spent on that...
    - jamilton 3y ago
      There's also the visual editor, which I think got a mixed reception, but I like it for quick edits.
- ff317 3y ago
  The salaries are much larger than what gets put in the "hosting" line, which merely covers things like leasing cage space in datacenters and paying for transit/transport/peering links. I'm not gonna do another deep dive on the org structure, because I've done it before when these topics come up ( like this one half a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 ), but I'll provide my overall view as a 10 year engineering veteran at the WMF who has fought many battles in this org, which you can take or leave: There are problems at the Foundation, like there are everywhere. Resources are not allocated as well as they should be, which is also common just about everywhere. However, by and large, the money is put to good use, and the employees of the Foundation are doing good and necessary work, and there's no way to run today's Wikipedia on today's Internet for anywhere close to $3M/year total organizational budget, so it's pretty disingenuous to use that as a comparison point. Go look at budgets for any other org which runs a top-N important site on the Internet for comparison. Consider that we adhere to stronger values and principles around rights and privacy and open source, all of which /increase/ our operating costs. WMF runs on a shoestring, relatively-speaking. WMF just had a ~5% layoff over budget reductions ( https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-layoffs.html https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-lay... ) in response to a community outcry about our fundraising. We (the engineers) regularly run into budgetary and/or priority constraints pursuing new useful SRE-level projects that increase scalability, reliability, or directly improve user experience (e.g. latency for readers and editors, rendering speed, better APIs for various consuming parties, more edge caches, more hardware redundancy, etc). We also don't get paid industry equivalent rates, or get the stocks or bonuses that we'd get elsewhere. You can make all the arguments you want about some past or present form of grift at some upper organizational levels, but I'll still contend that most of the money is going to good use, that it's very expensive to run Wikipedia responsibly and reliably, and that the foundation doesn't have the cash pile necessary to stop relying on donations for the long-term sustainability of its projects. Even if the budget we have was allocated perfectly, I'd still be arguing that we need more to do the job right.
  - akolbe 3y ago
    Well, the 5% layoff is more than balanced by the 25% increase in headcount (from 570 to 711) that appears to have happened between March 2022 and December 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-04-26/News_and_notes#Over_7%_of_Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_have_left_since_January_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... The Foundation's cash pile (not all in actual cash, of course) is currently at around $350 million, $100 million of which is in a completely non-transparent fund held by the Tides Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-03-09/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... There have been promises made for years and years that this fund would soon be converted into a standalone 501c3 and start filing an annual Form 990. Still has not happened. Even though the 501c3 has existed for almost a year now, the money is still with Tides and still nobody has ever seen an audited statement of what goes in and out. This said, I agree with you that WMF engineers do a lot of good work (much of it not necessarily apparent to casual readers as opposed to editors). It is noticeable that the site is more cared for.

lapinot 3y ago

Comparing wikipedia to facebook or twitter is ludicrous. They don't do any kind of data analysis (apart from some full-text indexing, which you can do easily on a laptop, it's a basic demo from FTS tools to index wikipedia). Sure they host media and handle lots of traffic but that's about it. It costs money for servers and some network engineers.

pas 3y ago
it's in the top10 sites worldwide, it's ridiculously naive to assume it's just servers and a few BGP dudes.

akolbe 3y ago

The actual Internet hosting costs have consistently been less than $3 million a year: 2022/2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2021-2022_Audit_Report.pdf#page=6 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim... 2020/2019: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2019-2020_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim... And they were the same a decade ago: 2012/2011: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL_11_12From_KPMG.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Admittedly, this doesn't include salaries.

IceWreck 3y ago
What about development costs ?
- akolbe 3y ago
  You mean for software features and the like? Some good work has been done there in the background – it's not stuff that readers would notice, but contributors do. It wouldn't be fair to say that all the money has been mis-spent – there are lots of people working at the Foundation who are doing good work and who are not getting rich – especially bearing in mind the cost of living in parts of the US (though this begs the question whether the work could not be done more cost-effectively elsewhere).
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Note - many wmf staff do not live in the usa. Some who do do not live in expensive parts of the usa.
- George83728 3y ago
  The last time Wikimedia Foundation released a new project website was WikiData in 2012, more than 10 years ago. Okay well maybe that's not fair. They did recently update the CSS for Wikipedia itself ... I don't know how many millions of dollars they spent on that...
  - jamilton 3y ago
    There's also the visual editor, which I think got a mixed reception, but I like it for quick edits.
ff317 3y ago
The salaries are much larger than what gets put in the "hosting" line, which merely covers things like leasing cage space in datacenters and paying for transit/transport/peering links. I'm not gonna do another deep dive on the org structure, because I've done it before when these topics come up ( like this one half a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640817 ), but I'll provide my overall view as a 10 year engineering veteran at the WMF who has fought many battles in this org, which you can take or leave: There are problems at the Foundation, like there are everywhere. Resources are not allocated as well as they should be, which is also common just about everywhere. However, by and large, the money is put to good use, and the employees of the Foundation are doing good and necessary work, and there's no way to run today's Wikipedia on today's Internet for anywhere close to $3M/year total organizational budget, so it's pretty disingenuous to use that as a comparison point. Go look at budgets for any other org which runs a top-N important site on the Internet for comparison. Consider that we adhere to stronger values and principles around rights and privacy and open source, all of which /increase/ our operating costs. WMF runs on a shoestring, relatively-speaking. WMF just had a ~5% layoff over budget reductions ( https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-layoffs.html https://blog.legoktm.com/2023/04/05/wikimedia-foundation-lay... ) in response to a community outcry about our fundraising. We (the engineers) regularly run into budgetary and/or priority constraints pursuing new useful SRE-level projects that increase scalability, reliability, or directly improve user experience (e.g. latency for readers and editors, rendering speed, better APIs for various consuming parties, more edge caches, more hardware redundancy, etc). We also don't get paid industry equivalent rates, or get the stocks or bonuses that we'd get elsewhere. You can make all the arguments you want about some past or present form of grift at some upper organizational levels, but I'll still contend that most of the money is going to good use, that it's very expensive to run Wikipedia responsibly and reliably, and that the foundation doesn't have the cash pile necessary to stop relying on donations for the long-term sustainability of its projects. Even if the budget we have was allocated perfectly, I'd still be arguing that we need more to do the job right.
- akolbe 3y ago
  Well, the 5% layoff is more than balanced by the 25% increase in headcount (from 570 to 711) that appears to have happened between March 2022 and December 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-04-26/News_and_notes#Over_7%_of_Wikimedia_Foundation_staff_have_left_since_January_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... The Foundation's cash pile (not all in actual cash, of course) is currently at around $350 million, $100 million of which is in a completely non-transparent fund held by the Tides Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-03-09/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... There have been promises made for years and years that this fund would soon be converted into a standalone 501c3 and start filing an annual Form 990. Still has not happened. Even though the 501c3 has existed for almost a year now, the money is still with Tides and still nobody has ever seen an audited statement of what goes in and out. This said, I agree with you that WMF engineers do a lot of good work (much of it not necessarily apparent to casual readers as opposed to editors). It is noticeable that the site is more cared for.